


"So, How Was Your Day?"

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: M/M, Slash, agent coulson's cellist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 12:56:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/431443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agent Coulson snatches a few moments’ leave with his cellist after assisting in New Mexico. NO AVENGERS SPOILERS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"So, How Was Your Day?"

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-Thor and pre-Avengers; no Avengers spoilers! Beta-ed by my beloved Ashie. <3

It’s getting on for twilight when he lets himself into the house; he can hear the strains of cello music floating on the air from the attic study, and winces as he recognises the composer. Stravinsky: that’s a bad sign, although not so certain a portent as, say, Strauss. He takes the hint and heads to the bedroom to get changed before he goes to say hello.

He closes the bedroom door out of habit as much as anything else, removing shades, jacket, badge, gun, tie, shirt, second gun in weary order. The full-length mirror on the wardrobe door shows a fresh crop of scrapes and bruises over old; he ignores it and hangs up his jacket so that it obscures his reflection. Tie and shirt are dropped on the floor in a puddle of cloth (he’ll catch hell if he doesn’t pick them up shortly, he knows) joined by trousers which started the day fresh-new and which now seem to contain half a New Mexican desert’s-worth of sand. He pulls on a fresh shirt, wincing as mal-used muscles protest at the movement, followed by clean trousers. In concession to the feelings of the cellist upstairs, however, he does at least put his shoes away in their proper place before sock-quietly leaving the room.

He has not been home for five – no, six days now, and as ever he is struck by a strange feeling of alienation, as if trespassing in the house he has owned for three years. Coming home after an extended stay on the Helicarrier is always bizarre, and he gets himself a glass of water (not alcohol, although he could use some) from the kitchen, trying to re-adjust. Out of weary-habit he switches on the TV and flicks through the channels; first to catch his eye is a CNN report from a just-levelled little town in New Mexico, and he promptly switches it off.

(He is lucky to be alive, he knows; they all are. That doesn’t mean he wants to be reminded of it.)

He climbs the stairs still clutching his glass of water, trying to re-accustom himself to civilianhood, and leans in the doorway with rather more relief than he’d really like, and just ... watches. 

The man playing the cello is tall – a few inches taller than he is – and slim, his grey eyes currently half-closed and almost obscured by red-brown curls. He’s only forty, but already there are mischievous strands of silver threading through his hair and stubbly beard, and he has appropriately long musician’s fingers. Arched with studied gracelessness over the instrument, he doesn’t look up immediately even though they both know he knows he’s being watched.

“Oh,” he offers, finally letting the last of the piece’s notes leak away to nothingness in the air between them. “How was your day?”

“Busy,” Coulson says truthfully, crossing the ocean of floor between them for an almost perfunctory kiss. “You’ll see it on the news, I expect.”

“Your work is so attention-grabbing,” he remarks. It occurs to Coulson that this is a bit rich, coming from the lead cellist of a professional orchestra which seems to thrive best on a regular diet of hysterical drama and over-the-top portents of doom, but all he says is “I’ve missed you too, Leo.”

“Mmm, well,” Leo says, and at last smiles at him – which answers the question he hadn’t particularly needed to ask. “How long have you got?”

“A few days, I think.” Fury had told him he looked like hell – probably an accurate assessment – and had ordered him to damn well go home before anything new could happen, which he’s pretty sure means he gets at least a day or two off. “Maybe a week, if I’m lucky.”

“You’ll have about twenty-four hours, then,” Leo states, matter-of-fact and without rancour; he could have been simply declaring that the sky was blue. 

“Probably,” he agrees, aware that his smile is at least a little sheepish. “Sorry.”

Pause.

“Bad day?”

Leo makes a small, irritated _moue_ of irritation with the hand holding the bow, as if flicking a fly off the end of it. “Oh, the second violins have had yet another internal spat and now none of them are talking to the others, the chief percussionist is in hospital with pneumonia – pneumonia, in July! – two of the brass section have attended one rehearsal each in three weeks, and we have exactly twenty-five days - _twenty-five days_ \- until the official state gala!”

“And I just had to run media interference on an attempted alien invasion in Albuquerque,” Coulson says with genuine gratitude, and leans down to lightly kiss his lover’s forehead. “Well. Buy you dinner?”

Leo smirks, an expression which suits him even though Coulson has reason to find it just slightly terrifying. “I made the reservation at Gianni’s as soon as you called. You can drive, though.”

“I _did_ get beaten up by an ancient Norse robot five hours ago,” he objects, plaintively, but it is more for the look of the thing than out of real disagreement: he knows by now when he’s lost. _Has_ lost, often enough.

“Then you should have an even higher respect for the wonders of twenty-first-century technology,” Leo informs him with what Coulson has a sneaking suspicion is mischief, but he does at last stand up to deliver a slow lingering kiss by way of compensation, those long fingers light on Coulson’s jaw. “Go get changed,” he adds. “We’re due by 9.”

Changing for dinner is a piece of etiquette that Coulson has never been entirely able to comprehend: why put on special clothes just to go out and eat? But it is by now simply another familiar small absurdity, the stuff coming home is made of. He always feels more comfortable on the SHIELD Helicarrier, where life is governed by regulations which he could quote in his sleep and which he can break, when the occasion demands it, by numbers and in alphabetical order. He thinks it probably ought to worry him, that he feels far more at home whilst digging up WWII-era superheroes and stopping lethal robots from destroying the population than he does off-duty in quiet suburbia, but it is that feeling of being somehow just a little estranged from the rest of the world which had first endeared Leo to him. Neither quite fits into the jigsaw laid out for them, and although both fake normality well, with each other there is at least no need to pretend it comes naturally.

“So long as there’s no Skrulls on the staff, this time,” he says. “Once was more than enough.”

“No aliens of any kind,” Leo assures him, and adds, as he rounds the staircase, “But we should have enough time to jump in the shower before we go, if you want.”

Coulson smiles even as his muscles protest at the awkward movement of descending the stairs. Small absurdities or no, he can’t deny that there is at least one major advantage in coming home.


End file.
